Texas GOP civil war reaches bruising climax with leadership battle

Long-simmering tensions within the Texas GOP are spilling out into the open amid a heated battle for the state House Speaker seat.

The fight underscores long-standing friction between the rump of what was once the Texas party’s establishment and the rising far-right faction that now controls most of the state’s government. 

It pits state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a top ally to outgoing Speaker Dade Phelan (R), against state Rep. David Cook, who was voted the state GOP’s Speaker nominee last month, in a struggle that risks further fracturing the state Legislature as it meets to confront some of Texas's most serious problems.

The Burrows-Cook stalemate has already spilled bad blood across the Republican caucus. On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) turned up the heat, warning of primary challenges for Republican incumbents who make “deals with Democrats to block a Republican majority-elected Speaker."

If Cook wins, it will be the first time in more than a decade that a candidate from the right wing of the Texas GOP claimed the Speakership — a political earthquake that belies a slower, decades-long process of intrapartisan grinding below the surface.

The current standoff is "the culmination of dozens of fights and significant ideological tension over the last two decades,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told The Hill. “This is the final fight.”

For both sides, the stakes are high and have driven strange alliances. Burrows, a conservative Republican who helped author bills dramatically restricting the authority of cities, has enlisted Democrats in a rebellion against the far-right faction that now controls the state GOP — a move that risks political suicide if he loses.

On the other side is David Cook, a Dallas-Fort Worth-area Republican backed by the party’s hard right — even though, as mayor of Mansfield, he voted in favor of tax increases and the city’s fracking ban, before recasting himself in the Legislature as a champion of the grassroots right.

Since Cook won the party’s nomination vote — in part because Burrows supporters walked out — his supporters in the Republican Party of Texas have launched a frontal attack on members supporting Burrows, whom they are threatening with censure, primary challenges and ultimate exile from the state party.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for a lot of GOP members, many of whom are reeling from watching Gov. Greg Abbott (R) bump off longtime allies who differed with him on school vouchers. Abbott has also hinted at support for Cook, urging that “we need a Texas House Speaker chosen by a majority of Republicans in accordance with the Republican Caucus Rules.”

And in seeking to openly exclude Democrats not just from leadership but from getting their bills heard at all, the Cook faction has effectively created a countering coalition of mainline Republicans and Democrats — an awkward alliance that Burrows has said gives him enough votes to win.

Now some are warning that, whoever wins, the result could be a chamber so contaminated by infighting it can’t get anything done, just as it’s called on to face some of Texas’s biggest crises, like looming water shortages and the state of the electric grid.

Houston-area state Rep. Gary Gates warned in a letter to Cook’s public supporters last week that their candidate has a “very narrow” path to victory. He also raised the alarm that the tensions could set up a “poisonous atmosphere” heading into the next legislative session. In a return letter, Cook accused him of “fostering division and uncertainty to manufacture a need for [a new] candidate.”

Burrows supporters claim they have been receiving threatening text messages from Abraham George, the newly elected firebrand chair of the Texas Republican Party. The party organization voted unanimously for Cook after Burrows supporters walked out, per a text exchange acquired by KETK.

“My desire is for Republicans to unite in accordance with the caucus bylaws and GOP platform,” George wrote to East Texas Republican Cody Harris. Those documents, taken together, threaten members like Harris with being barred from Republican primaries if they vote against Cook, or for the use of secret ballots in the Speaker’s race.

George urged Harris to call him about his vote “before the Republican Party of Texas sends any direct mail into your district,” which Harris read as a clear threat to stir up opposition among his constituents.

In response, Harris accused George of being more interested in purging the party than fighting Democrats in the general. “I had a Democratic challenger in the fall, but now is when I hear from you?” he texted back. “I will continue to do what I believe is right.”

“Good to know,” George wrote back. “See you on the other side :)"

George is hitting the road next week alongside Paxton, crisscrossing the state to turn the screws on Republican incumbents who have yet to back the Speaker nominee.

The move from Paxton — who backed challengers and infused money into races this year to oust several lawmakers that voted for his impeachment — adds to a pressurized environment in Texas politics where, as Rottinghaus said, "everyone’s looking over their shoulder.”

Gates, the Houston-area representative, told The Hill that this bad blood and reliance on “terroristic threats” represent a significant liability for the Cook faction’s ability to win — or govern once they do.

Many Cook supporters he has spoken with, Gates said, are with him “just because they're just worried about their primary opponent and young. And when you build a coalition through fear and threats, that's not a very strong coalition.”

The party's key problem comes down to math: The winning Speaker candidate needs 76 of the chamber’s 150 votes to win when the Texas House votes on a new leader in mid-January. Republicans hold 88 seats in the lower chamber.

Cook has listed 56 public supporters so far. Burrows released 76 names last month, though The Texas Tribune reported that at least three said they shouldn’t have been on that list. But Gates warned that Cook’s support may be less sturdy than it appears as well: that as members realize that he can’t get to 76 without Democrats, and that Democrats don't trust him, they could begin to drift away.

“Cook doesn’t have the votes to be Speaker without Republicans and Burrows doesn’t have the votes without the Democrats," Rottinghaus said. “That puts them both in an awkward situation, having to fight to the very last minute.”

There’s another option, which members like Gates are pushing for: another candidate steps forward who is acceptable to the state GOP but free of the resentment that now swirls around Cook, though other experts say that gets less likely as the vote approaches.

Perhaps the biggest question, strategists said, is what Democrats do — and what deals Burrows might broker with them as he tries to raise his numbers.

“What really matters about that, more than anything, is: Well, what does he have to give them in order to get [the] number of votes?” Austin-based Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak, the Travis County GOP chair, said.

Matt Angle, founder and director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic PAC, said Republicans’ next moves can help define the state House “as a force separate from the lieutenant governor and the governor.”

Democrats are already thinking about what their price should be. In a letter this week, former Democratic caucus Chair Trey Martinez Fischer urged the party — which Republican divisions leave as potentially the House’s biggest voting bloc — to stay united and not back either candidate without a significant concession.

The party, he wrote, has “an unprecedented opportunity to change the fortunes of millions of Texans. Those of us who remain uncommitted will determine who leads the Texas House of Representatives.”

On Friday, Cook responded with an appeal to Democrats who have thus far rebuffed him, arguing that the “traditional script” in which a majority of Democrats partner with a minority of Republicans to secure the Speakership had served both parties badly.

The jostling between Lone Star State lawmakers has also drawn national attention. Donald Trump Jr. last month waded in to back Cook, blasting “so-called Republicans cutting a deal with liberal Democrats to elect a speaker instead of uniting behind the Republican nominee.”

It comes against the backdrop of the election for the Speakership in the U.S. House, as Trump-backed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) battled to hold on to his top slot with a razor-thin Republican majority. He clinched the seat with a one-vote margin of error.

Both fights signal enduring friction among Republicans across the country even as the party celebrates a victorious election night.

No matter who wins, Mackowiak said, the losing side of the leadership fight is going to head into the next 140-day legislative session with “a lot of anger and a lot of frustration.”

“The hope is that after the Speaker vote, everybody gets on the same page, and we start pulling in the same direction, passing the legislative priorities and doing the big things that we know we need to do.”

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